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Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

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Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#121

Post by ratww »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #49
Apocryphon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.

> Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht... ---- As for your question: ClassMa…

Funny, one of my first freelancing jobs about 20 years ago was working remote for a company that used "identity verification" for some god forsaken reason. It's long dead for other reasons, but at the time they did their research and the #1 reason this was narrowing the funnel was that users assumed the "identity confirmation" thing was a scam, or that the site was porn.

Changing to "service costs $1", Metafilter style, actually brought more money to the company and increased conversions.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#122

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

ycombobreaker wrote: post #59
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht... ---- As for your question: ClassMa…

> Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0" I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then. Reading through the article that you linked, as well as…

> I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.

AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s.

> Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.

In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious.

Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that).

------

Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#123

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lotophage wrote: post #109
Apocryphon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.

The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (well.com) is paid to post I believe, and has been around since about 1985.

The Well is an Internet pioneer. It long predates the Web.

I think that Jaron Lanier was involved in the early Well. I remember him discussing it, in an old Wired interview.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#124

Post by Talanes »

newbie789 wrote: post #12
tylersmith wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but Something Awfully famously censored certain types of porn-related posts leading to 4chan so unfettered free speech isn't something SA has ever really been known for.

Having rules on a private website is against the concept of free speech? How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.

Wait are you part of this conversation?

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#125

Post by nefitty »

capableweb wrote: post #102
jychang wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the market Substack is trying to tap into, although not quite the same obviously.

No, I don't think you can put Substack in that same bucket. Substack has raised a total of $82.4M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 31, 2021 from a Series B round. Their investors are gonna want to get that money back, and how do you think that'll happen? Substack is aiming to scale way beyond SA ever had the ambition to, and probably dreaming about ending up like Twitter, Facebook et a…

I think they meant that Substack is about giving people the tools to do the niche stuff. It's not doing niche stuff itself.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#126

Post by cool_dude85 »

kuraudoOishii wrote: post #116
lazyfuture wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something. Notch released beta versions of Minecraft there for people to "check out what I'm working on" A LOT of stuff happened on the forums. It was nuts. The Franz Ferdinand meme everyone is going off of (which makes a TON of sense if you witnessed it and ev…

You're talking about vilerat; great guy. There are writeups about him.

The most well-known write-ups of the not great guy vilerat are his racist tirades against African people.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#127

Post by bluedino »

devonkim wrote: post #33

What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users…

Internet brands bought up a bunch of v bulletin boards a few years ago. You could pay to be a "premium member" but you still had to deal with the free members and didn't get many benefits other than skipping ands and perhaps access to PM's

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#128

Post by enneff »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #90
deltaonefour wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to hear the Moms' side of the story. An abusive man can wield power through domestic violence but an abusive women is far more insidious. An abusive woman does not have the strength to employ violence so she uses other means inflict damage. Manipulation, legal tactics, lies and other techniques are used. The key here is that most of these techniques are subtle. I don't know what happened here, but I can almost…

What concerned me in that post was this bit: > His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them Assuming the children aren't 14+, this is where a white lie is in their best interests. Telling them this, true as it may be, will only traumatise them further than they may already be. I know it can be very hard though when you've had a traumatic rela…

I thought the implication was they’d have to tell the kids that he died. That he didn’t say goodbye is something they’ll immediately know themselves.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#130

Post by jfax »

strangeattractr wrote: post #115
mattlondon wrote: post #97

Perhaps someone can enlighten me: So what was the impact on the internet then? Beyond a few meme templates or abbreviations or whatever, what has the actual lasting impact been? People say this about 4chan as well, but beyond passing meme fads I have yet to see anything convincing?

4chan's influence is not good but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In fact it's so influential that a lot of the garbage on there bleeds into the real world e.g. Pizzagate, QAnon, the OK symbol means 'white power' hoax. Most of the terrible stuff that people blame facebook or twitter for spreading usually comes from there.

4chan hardly had any responsibility for Qanon. Q poster was banned very early after most recognised it as a larp. It is overwhelmingly the legacy of infinity chan.

This is not withstanding who was eventually revealed to be one of the people behind it all, but I hate to overexplain this because the bottom-line is that this whole idea that lowtax was some kind of Gavrilo Princep is over-the-top and kinda dumb. The 4chan-qanon connection is tenuous, only more tenuous than the idea that a "hentai ban" caused 4chan, which only happened much later after 4chan was founded.

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